LW 5963. Topics. (1,2 Hours)
Offers students an opportunity to learn about timely issues, develop new skills, or explore areas of broad interest in an immersive, short-course format. Content and instructors vary by offering. May be repeated three times.
LW 6400. Law, Policy and Legal Argument. (4 Hours)
This course explores the legal levers that drive policy change. Advocates often intend to alter public policy in support of an organization or a cause. But influencing policy requires understanding who sets policy in the first instance. Is the issue governed by federal, state or local law? Are key decision makers elected or appointed? Who is it most important to persuade and what sorts of arguments are likely to convince the key audience? This course will introduce students to the mechanisms of government that drive key policy debates across a wide range of issues, which may include health care, market regulation, environmental policy, housing, education, the internet, privacy, and social policy. Emphasis will be placed on tailoring arguments to different constituencies.
LW 6407. Introduction to U.S. Law and Legal System. (3 Hours)
Introduces principles and structures of the legal system in the United States. Covers the U.S. system of government, the U.S. judicial systems at the federal and state levels, U.S. sources of law, common law methodology, and the roles of legal professionals. Designed to familiarize the student with the relevant and governing legal principles that are used in American jurisprudence, including substantive and procedural law. Emphasizes legal terminology in our contemporary legal system.
LW 6962. Elective. (1-4 Hours)
Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.
LW 7329. Environmental Law. (3 Hours)
This course focuses on federal and state environmental laws. Topics include pollution control, waste management, and cleanup of contaminated land and water. The course explores legislative policy and regulatory decisions as well as enforcement issues. We will give attention to questions of environmental justice and to the strategic use of legal tools in working to ensure safe and healthy surroundings for diverse groups of people.
LW 7333. Family Law. (3 Hours)
Studies the key legal doctrines of the family law system in the United States. Explores regulation of intimate relationships including marriage, divorce, and the economics of dissolution. Examines the legal concept of the family, parental rights and responsibilities, custody, support, dependency, and the best interests of the child. Considers variations in state laws regulating families and the intersection of family law with other areas of law such as tax, immigration, and administrative law.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7335. Health Law. (3 Hours)
This course examines the legal regulation of the provision of healthcare services. Much of the focus is on the relationship between law and healthcare policy. Topics include access to health insurance and healthcare, healthcare financing, malpractice liability, the organization and responsibility of healthcare institutions, especially hospitals, the regulation of the quality of care and the formulation of health policy. This course is highly recommended for all students enrolled in the JD/MPH dual degree program, but is open to others as well.
LW 7358. Social Welfare Law. (3 Hours)
This course examines American public assistance as a legal institution. After reviewing the historical, sociological and juridical roots of the welfare system, students examine the laws governing major assistance programs, especially eligibility requirements, rules governing grant determination, work and family rules, and procedural rights. Primary emphasis is on statutory and regulatory construction. The course explores methods by which lawyers can deal with the system: advocacy in the administrative process, litigation, legislative reform and representation of recipient organizations.
LW 7369. Intellectual Property. (3 Hours)
In our modern day information economy, the law of intellectual property has taken on enormous importance to both creators and users of intellectual creations. Introduces students to the classic principles of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret law and explores the ways in which those principles are shifting and adapting in response to new technology.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7394. Land Use. (3 Hours)
A survey of legal doctrines, techniques and institutions relating to regulation of the use of real property. Topics covered include constitutional questions of takings by public agencies, the scope of the police power as it affects land use and the basic techniques of zoning and subdivision control. Students study, among other issues, recent cases on exclusion of low income housing, current techniques to encourage housing development (inclusionary or “linkage” regulations) and First Amendment questions arising from land use controls.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7424. Labor Law 1. (4 Hours)
Introduces the law of labor relations by examining the National Labor Relations Act and leading cases, in conjunction with historical, social, and economic materials. Topics include employee organization, union recognition, unfair labor practices, and collective bargaining.
LW 7475. First Amendment. (3 Hours)
This course examines several rights protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The focus is on the principles and processes developed by the judiciary to protect various forms of speech, expression and association. The course does NOT deal with the free exercise of religion or the establishment clause. The course also focuses on integrating doctrine with the core values of the First Amendment as well as emphasizing the need for students to develop their own preferred approach to protecting free expression. The course does not, except tangentially, deal with other parts of the Bill of Rights.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7488. Sexuality, Gender and the Law. (3 Hours)
This course uses case law and theory to address doctrinal problems and justice concerns associated with gender and sexuality. The syllabus is organized around notions such as privacy, identity and consent, all of which are conceptual pillars upon which arguments in the domain of sexuality and gender typically rely. Doctrinal topics include same-sex marriage, sodomy, sexual harassment, discrimination, among others, but the course is not a doctrinal survey; it is a critical inquiry into key concepts that cut across doctrinal areas. Students should expect to write a paper and share some of what they have learned with the class.
LW 7491. International Human Rights and the Global Economy. (3 Hours)
This course surveys the international human rights legal system. It includes the promotion and protection of economic, social, and cultural rights (such as rights to health, food, water, and education) and civil and political rights (such as equality and non-discrimination, the right to human security, the prohibition on torture, and rights to religious and cultural expression). We begin by examining the history and theoretical origins of human rights law. We then engage the legal framework under international and regional human rights treaties and interpretations of them by international, regional and domestic courts and other actors. We examine international, regional and domestic mechanisms for monitoring compliance. Finally, we grapple with tensions among cultural and religious imperatives and traditional human rights.
LW 7494. Bioethics and the Law. (3 Hours)
Explores the intersection of law, medicine, and ethics in diverse contexts that call for the evaluation of policies and practices implicating individual or public health. Analyzes the tensions between legal and ethical frameworks and considers how to address them. Focuses on bioethical and legal approaches in areas that may include end-of-life care, gender-affirming care, reproductive care, race-based differential outcomes in healthcare, and care of disabled patients, among other areas.
LW 7512. Problems in Public Health Law. (3 Hours)
Explores the rationales for using law to protect and preserve the public’s health, the legal tools that may be used to achieve that end, and the conflicts and problems that may result from legal interventions. Topics discussed include the use of law to reduce the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases, control of tobacco and other hazardous products, bioterrorism, and the threats to civil liberties and minority groups engendered by all such legal efforts. Students who do not meet course prerequisites may seek permission of instructor.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7514. Natural Resources Law. (3 Hours)
This course addresses legal requirements and institutions dealing with animal and plant species, biological resources, habitats, and ecosystems. Major themes include biological diversity, endangered and threatened species, public and private rights in migratory resources, public trust doctrine, the allocation of power among federal, state, and local governments, and the roles of administrative agencies in ecosystem management. The course provides opportunities to explore specific topics of interest such as environmental ethics, wetlands protection, fisheries law, Native American hunting rights and fishing rights, and management of national parks, forests, and grazing lands.
LW 7525. Law and Economic Development. (3 Hours)
Examines the prevailing economic theories of and strategies for economic development since World War II and the legal and institutional frameworks devised to implement these strategies. Questions we will explore will include: What kinds of legal and institutional arrangements best facilitate economic growth? How does law structure and shape markets? What is development; and how can it best be measured? Can legal instruments be used effectively to address underdevelopment in a structural way? While the focus is on development in the so-called “developing world”; we will also explore some strategies for addressing development in a local community context. Course concludes by applying what we have learned to address several development case studies posing particular problems in particular regions and contexts.
LW 7526. Juvenile Courts: Delinquency, Abuse, Neglect. (3 Hours)
Examines the evolution of the juvenile court system and issues related to juvenile justice and child welfare. Includes the study of procedural and substantive principles related to court subject matter, including delinquency, youthful offender, status offense, and abuse and neglect jurisdiction. In attempting to focus on connecting theory to practice, the class employs a contextual lens by considering the larger communities and systems that affect children, families, and public safety. This entails consideration of the consequences of decisions and policies in and out of courtrooms. Related topics include adolescent development; racial, ethnic, and gender equity; access to educational and mental health services; and public health.
LW 7530. Education Law. (3 Hours)
Surveys current issues in U.S. education law. Topics may include high-stakes testing, school choice and the charter school movement, resegregation, special education, the school-to-prison pipeline, and school funding.
LW 7539. Employment Law—Job Security and Rights. (3 Hours)
This course surveys legal and policy issues concerning job security, focusing primarily on law governing the termination of private sector employment. Students develop an understanding of the history and scope of the underlying employment-at-will doctrine and the primary ways in which the at-will doctrine has been modified through common law and statute.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7550. Refugee and Asylum Law. (3 Hours)
Explores humanitarian relief under the Immigration and Nationality Act including refugee resettlement, asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture. Focuses on U.S. law as it has evolved since passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. Analyzes administrative and judicial case law from the United States and compares relevant international law and standards in other countries. Examines the administrative adjudication system with attention to issues including due process, cross-cultural communication, and trauma-informed lawyering. Discusses policy developments that impact asylum seekers in the United States.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7588. Reproductive Rights and Health. (3 Hours)
Examines how sexual and reproductive health laws impede or increase access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and shape how we understand what constitutes sexual and reproductive health. Attention is paid to understanding legal doctrine, public health research, and critically assessing issues arising from sexual and reproductive health law. Draws on various tools of analysis including critical race theory, critical legal theory, human rights, and a range of public health methods. Topics covered include, amongst others, sexual and reproductive health law as it pertains to abortion, sexuality, pregnancy, marriage, healthcare in prisons, immigrants, HIV/AIDS, and sex education.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7597. Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. (1-6 Hours)
Introduces investigative research and restorative justice approaches that have brought some measure of redress to families and communities affected by lynching and other forms of racialized violence in the Jim Crow era. Offers students an opportunity to conduct factual investigations by tracking down materials from government repositories, newspaper archives, and court proceedings; collaborating with practicing lawyers, professional archivists, and historians; conducting interviews; and, where feasible, visiting the region where the events took place.
LW 7606. Drug Law and Policy. (3 Hours)
Focuses on three domains of the broader subject of drug law: the evolution and current state of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; the architecture of the drug regulation system in the United States including the distinct space occupied by the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Drug Enforcement Agency; and the role of regulation and tort litigation in harmonizing drug policy with science. Discusses legal and policy case studies.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C
LW 7612. Wrongful Convictions and Post-Conviction Remedies. (3 Hours)
Analyzes legal and procedural safeguards designed to prevent wrongful convictions. Examines how the emergence of DNA testing has assisted law enforcement in solving crimes while also helping to expose the scale of wrongful convictions in the United States. Explores the primary factors that contribute to the phenomenon of wrongful convictions, the state and federal procedures through which post-conviction claims are litigated, and potential reforms to protect against the conviction of the innocent. Addresses the role of biological evidence, eyewitness identification, false confessions, and forensic science in criminal justice.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7620. Human Behavior, Legal Doctrine, and Policy Design. (3 Hours)
Compares accounts of human behavior, including the utilitarian/law and economics view of man as a rational calculator of his self-interest, with classical and contemporary alternatives to that description, including behavioral economics. Evaluates the reasons for doubting or crediting these competing accounts and considers their implications for determining appropriate legal doctrines and regulatory approaches. Addresses issues such as whether the views of human behavior that shape consumer protection case law and the Supreme Court's commercial speech doctrine are justified and whether, and in what circumstances, regulations may appropriately seek to help people by prescribing, proscribing, or "nudging" their behavior.
LW 7634. Energy Law and Policy. (3 Hours)
Introduces U.S. energy law and policy with a specific focus on the regulated electricity sector. Explores the dynamics of natural monopoly markets, public utilities and their regulation, and the interplay of state and federal power in the energy space. Examines coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydropower, renewables, storage, and efficiency for their impacts and potential as electrical energy sources in a carbon-constrained world. Concludes by investigating the legal potential to proactively foster and sustain a transition to a carbon-sustainable energy economy.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7635. Laboratory Seminar in Applied and Critical Legal Design. (4 Hours)
Offers students the opportunity to critically engage with design methods and principles in the development of new solutions and ideas for our legal systems, institutions, and problems. Examines methodologies derived from the fields of product, service, and critical design and emphasizes hands-on student engagement with structured creative processes, field observations, prototyping or other methods derived from a diversity of creative disciplines. Students apply these methodologies and skills in the formulation of a response to a timely design question. Students’ exploration of critical design fosters a vision of a future world where everyone is empowered to use the law.
LW 7651. Human Rights in the United States. (3 Hours)
Explores the role of international human rights frameworks and strategies in social justice lawyering in the United States. Explores how lawyers are bringing human rights home on a range of issues by using human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and Inter-American Human Rights System; drawing on international human rights and comparative foreign law in litigation before U.S. courts; and engaging in other human rights-based advocacy such as documentation, organizing, and human rights education. Discusses how a human rights approach provides important strategic leverage and highlights the interdependence of economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights. Through skills exercises, assignments, and real-world problems, offers students an opportunity to develop practical skills to address policies on local, state, and national levels and to support social movements.
LW 7664. Law and Inequality. (3,4 Hours)
Explores inequality from a range of disciplinary perspectives and the difference that can make in a variety of legal, social, and economic contexts. Elaborates methodologies for mapping ways diverse legal regimes and concepts contribute to the production, recognition, reinforcement, and maintenance of hierarchies of privilege and disadvantage between individuals, groups, localities, regions, and nations. Identifies key legal drivers in the production of inequities and explores how they shift bargaining power, redistribute resources, or otherwise ameliorate inequities or their adverse consequences. Students research a circumstance of inequality and develop a legal map to engage it. With permission of instructor, students may register for an additional credit by completing a substantial paper or equivalent writing project (in addition to other course requirements) as required by the instructor.
LW 7667. Law and Ethics of Advocacy. (3 Hours)
What limits are there on actions aimed at influencing public officials or public opinion? What limits should there be? Clearly, it is unlawful to offer a bribe to a public official to produce a desirable outcome. But what constitutes a bribe? Can a lobbyist send a wedding gift to a favorite legislator? Are the rules different when advocacy efforts reach beyond United States borders? Are there limits on what an advocate can say to promote a product or service? Where is the line between conduct that is legally permissible and conduct that is not? To what extent are legal boundaries and ethical boundaries aligned? This course will explore the ethical and legal issues that arise in connection with advocacy.
LW 7669. Law and Technology. (3 Hours)
Examines law and technology as both processes and artifacts endemic to human groups, who have been toolmakers and lawmakers since human history has been recorded. Yet, in recent times, development of technological things has outpaced development in the law, bringing about what we might describe as new “design challenges” within the law. Considers several disputes around ownership and property, and safety and risk, and offers students a conceptual framework from the social study of science and technology by which to understand technology and the law. Focuses on the regulation of “digital labor” and algorithmically convened labor markets, such as Uber.
Prerequisite(s): LW 6400 with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7681. Law and Biotechnology. (3 Hours)
Seeks to identify and explore important ethical, legal, and policy issues associated with the challenges resulting from developments in biotechnology and the life sciences. Considers the ways in which existing legal approaches and instruments dealing with such critical issues as genetic discrimination, intellectual property rights in biotechnology, regulating new reproductive technologies, drug development, informed consent, responsible conduct of research, forensic uses of DNA, and privacy have been thrown into question. Examines how these developments are reconstituting concepts of legal rights and obligations of people in relation to their governing institutions. Focuses particularly on human genetics.
LW 7692. Collaborative Businesses. (2-3 Hours)
Examines the fundamental principles, structures, finance, management and governance associated with collaborative businesses (with a focus on co-operatives).
LW 7697. Issues in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. (3 Hours)
Examines cutting-edge issues in human rights and humanitarian law through presentations by leading scholars in the field and in-depth seminar discussions. Emphasizes both core concepts and sophisticated critiques of human rights in a range of areas including conflict and war, accountability and justice, race and racism, and colonialism and inequality.
LW 7699. Efforts in Criminal Law Minimalism. (3 Hours)
Examines recent efforts in criminal legal reform including legislative reform, judicial challenges, community organization, and public media campaigns. Introduces modern abolitionist critiques of policing and mass incarceration and some responses. Presents several reforms to change the U.S. criminal legal system including efforts to remove police from particular settings, reforms to pretrial detention, changing the system of public defense, changing the jury selection process/Batson reform, eliminating felony murder, and addressing draconian criminal sentencing.
LW 7700. Intellectual Property and Social Justice. (3 Hours)
Examines the social justice aspects of different forms of intellectual property. Combines a study of contemporary issues in law and society with appropriate readings that provide theoretical, doctrinal, and social context for the use of and resistance to intellectual property.
Prerequisite(s): LW 7369 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of C- or LW 7501 (may be taken concurrently) with a minimum grade of C-
LW 7703. Spatial Justice, Legal Ethnography, and the Lawscape. (2 Hours)
Examines the intersections of law, space, and society through the lenses of spatial justice and legal ethnography. Explores foundational and contemporary theories addressing how legal frameworks interact with spatial arrangements, social institutions, and power dynamics. Topics include the socio-spatial dialectic, the "lawscape," intersectionality, reparative spatial futures, and participatory and ethnographic research methods. Incorporates site-based inquiry and socio-legal research practices that connect theoretical frameworks to lived environments. Offers students an opportunity to critically analyze spatial inequities in areas such as housing, environmental justice, and urban governance and to consider how legal systems both shape and respond to spatial injustice. Uses written presentations, oral presentations, and visual forms of analysis to explore the relationship between law and spatial experience.
LW 7706. State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights. (3 Hours)
Introduces students to the unique role that state constitutions play in our federal system. Surveys the historic development of state constitutions, and the connections between state constitutions and national constitutional developments. Emphasizes the role of state constitutions in protecting individual rights.
LW 7976. Directed Study. (1-6 Hours)
Offers independent work under the direction of members of the department on a chosen topic. Course content depends on instructor. May be repeated two times for a maximum of six semester hours.
LW 7983. Special Topics in Law. (1-8 Hours)
Covers special topics in law. May be repeated up to nine times for a maximum of 30 semester hours.